Journal article
Observing the host galaxies of high-redshift quasars with JWST: predictions from the BLUETIDES simulation
MA Marshall, SJB Wyithe, RA Windhorst, TD Matteo, Y Ni, S Wilkins, RAC Croft, M Mechtley
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2021
Abstract
The bright emission from high-redshift quasars completely conceals their host galaxies in the rest-frame ultraviolet/optical, with detection of the hosts in these wavelengths eluding even the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) using detailed point spread function (PSF) modelling techniques. In this study, we produce mock images of a sample of z = 7 quasars extracted from the BLUETIDES simulation, and apply Markov chain Monte Carlo-based PSF modelling to determine the detectability of their host galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While no statistically significant detections are made with HST, we predict that at the same wavelengths and exposure times JWST NIRCam imaging will dete..
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Grants
Awarded by Swinburne University of Technology
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referee for their useful suggestions that have improved the quality of this work. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. The BLUETIDES simulation was run on the BlueWaters facility at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Part of this work was performed on the OzSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology, which is funded by Swinburne University of Technology and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). MAM acknowledges the support of an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, a Postgraduate Writing Up Award sponsored by the Albert Shimmins Fund, and the National Research Council of Canada Plaskett Fellowship. TDM acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ACI1614853, NSF AST-1517593, NSF AST-1616168 and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) ATP 19-ATP190084 and 80NSSC20K0519, ATP. TDM and RAC also acknowledge ATP 80NSSC18K101 and NASA ATP 17-0123. We acknowledge support provided by NASA through grants GO-12332.*A, GO12974.*A, and GO-12613.*A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This work was supported by NASA JWST Interdisciplinary Scientist grants NAG5-12460, NNX14AN10G, and 80NSSC18K0200 to RAW from the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). This paper made use of Python packages and software AstroPy (Astropy Collaboration 2013), astroRMS (Mechtley 2011), BigFile (Feng, Bird & Francois Lanusse 2017), corner (Foreman-Mackey 2016), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), FLARE (Wilkins 2019a), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (van der Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), Pandas (Pandas Development Team 2020), Photutils (Bradley et al. 2018), PSFMC (Mechtley 2019), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Synphot (STScI Development Team 2018), and SynthObs (Wilkins 2019b). This paper alsomakes use of version 17.00 of CLOUDY, last described by Ferland et al. (2017), and version 2.2.1 of the Binary Population and Spectral Population Synthesis (BPASS) model (Stanway & Eldridge 2018).